


Metamorphosis Began

by animesiren



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Decisions, Gen, Miles is the bestest, class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-18
Updated: 2012-06-18
Packaged: 2017-11-08 01:36:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/437686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/animesiren/pseuds/animesiren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ariadne is sitting in class when she realizes she feels like she's dreaming. "It will eat you up," Miles tells her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Metamorphosis Began

All of a sudden for a moment, just a moment, Ariadne felt like she was in a dream.  
   
She panicked.  
   
Looking around her with wide eyes she saw the lecture hall, the other students, and the professor gesturing at the front. Her mind felt sluggish though, and her eyes widened in adrenaline driven fear before she released a breath and relaxed.  
   
She had walked into this room not half an hour ago. She had awoken in her apartment this morning, had eaten breakfast, and had walked all the way to the University. Ariadne had been prepared to start her first semester back at the school after inception.  
   
Ariadne knew how she had gotten where she was. She wasn’t dreaming.  
   
Ariadne couldn’t help the seeping disappointment that was stretching its way across her body. She missed the dream world more than she thought possible, and even if someone had put her under to extract from her it would have meant that she had the chance to taste dreamshare again.  
   
The summer had been surreal. Ariadne had drifted anywhere her fancy took her. She had reveled in a new sense of freedom. But coming back to the University was like submitting to the life of a commoner after having lived the life of a queen.  
   
It was frustrating. An itch had crawled under her skin and refused to leave again.  
   
Ariadne began to have to focus on her breathing. It was difficult to sit at her nondescript desk and look at her classmates and pretend she was one of them. It was impossible to not shout her secret in their faces.  
   
Ariadne put a hand flat against her desk to steady herself. She breathed out. She breathed in.  
   
Then she opened her eyes and let her panic grip her.  
   
Ariadne packed her notebook and sketching supplies away as noiselessly as she could but when she made her way along the row she bumped her hip into a desk, stumbling. Fresh panic and anxiety flooded her veins and then she sprinted as fast from the classroom as she could.  
   
Miles watched her go from his position behind the podium. He felt weary.  
   
X-_X-_X  
   
A cool Parisian evening was what Ariadne had always most enjoyed about the city. After the sun had set the city famous for life and adventure seemed to, as a collective whole, take a breath and still. It didn’t last long, but it did last long enough for Ariadne to find herself strolling along campus, a last ditch attempt to escape the solitude of her apartment.  
   
She could stand here, in the center of what had been all she could see and breathe just a few months ago, and she could remember why she fell in love with every brick of the place.  
   
Everything about the school, and about the city, was what Ariadne had always dreamed of. She used to be able to sit and draw the school’s structures over and over again. She used to be content with immersing herself in the architecture and just floating there.  
   
All she sketched these days were vast cityscapes, paradoxical anomalies, and mazes upon mazes.  
   
Ariadne sat, defeated, on the nearest stone bench.  
   
The truth was something she hadn’t noticed over the summer. When she was still flying high in the afterglow of a job well done she hadn’t noticed much of anything else. The thing was…  
   
The thing was she hadn’t gotten a call.  
   
No job offers, and no word from Arthur or any of the other team members. There wasn’t a link to their world anywhere, not one that she could find. To her, she’d been stranded in normalcy and left to drown there.  
   
Reality wasn’t enough for her anymore, and the fact that she could recognize that, after only one job, made her fear for her life more than she ever had in the past. Even when the threat of limbo loomed over her in a crumbling city of Mal and Dom’s failed dreams she hadn’t feared for her life like she did currently.  
   
Stars twinkled above her in the city of living dreams and all Ariadne could think about was the gift of pure creation.  
   
“My dear girl.”  
   
Ariadne stilled, but even without turning she knew that the words were for her. The sympathy was raw, and all too easy to notice. The owner of the voice knew every thought in her mind right now.  
   
Ariadne turned “Professor.” She tried to smile at the man but couldn’t even bring the corners of her mouth to curve upwards.  
   
Miles stood not too far off, staring at her. It wasn’t hard to imagine what he saw. Whether it was the ghost of his dead daughter, in the form of another young woman lost to world of dreams, or just a student poised in evidence of having wasted her chance at life.  
   
Ariadne shifted farther down the bench when the man sat down next to her. Was guilt the reason why she couldn’t look the much loved professor in the eye? Ariadne could only assume that it was.  
   
Miles spoke without preamble. “We can recognize very few gifts of reality,” he began “To us the dream offers more than we can imagine.”  
   
“I know,” Ariadne murmured, instead of staying silent.  
   
“Reality becomes the droll joke, the prediction that always becomes real,” he gestured “After a fashion reality becomes as stale as rainwater.”  
   
Ariadne was shocked to realize that her eyes were moistening. Her hands clenched in her lap.  
   
“When I stopped researching for the dreamshare program,” Miles continued, his voice was calm and relaxed “I had anchors to hold onto, but anchors that I knew wouldn’t always be there for me.”  
   
“I had a wife that I loved,” he said “And…a daughter.”  
   
Ariadne’s lips moved but nothing came out.  
   
“Even with such great joys in the waking world I still felt the burn and yearned for what lay at the end of the IV line,” Miles reclined back against the mottled brick wall. “I had made dreamshare my world for so long that for a while I didn’t understand how I could live without it.”  
   
Finally Miles turned to look right at Ariadne, who, for the life of her, couldn’t bring herself to look away from the sincerity that was shining at her from the elderly man’s eyes. Ariadne felt the water in her eyes well up and overflow, salty tracks making their way across her cheeks.  
   
“I know exactly what you are thinking, what you are going through,” he reached over to clasp a hand on her shoulder.  
   
“I shot your daughter,” Ariadne’s voice shook, and barely rose above a whisper. Miles’ hand tightened almost imperceptibly on her shoulder.  
   
“Well,” he replied after a pause, his voice raspier than before, and his eyes hooded “The way Dom tells it, you saved his life.”  
   
Ariadne couldn’t stop the ball of grief that welled in the pit of her stomach and she immediately ducked her head so that the professor wouldn’t have to see her sob.  
   
“This is a horrible life,” Miles continued, standing. Ariadne wasn’t sure which life he was referring to. Whether he meant that way she existed now, half in the past and in dreams and half in the life of a respectable student, or whether he meant the pursuit of the life that he had left behind him. After another moment Ariadne rationed that he could even mean the life of normalcy that she had returned to.  
   
“It will eat you up,” he warned “And it will leave absolutely nothing behind.”  
   
Ariadne stubbornly wiped at the tears. “There is good in a life of dreams isn’t there?” she insisted “There’s fantastic things to be found there.”  
   
“Oh yes,” he said nodding.  
   
Miles looked around them, the city finally coming to life for its nighttime wonders. “This is something that I caution you to choose. It’s not a life that you can fall into. You have to _choose_.”  
   
Ariadne was already reaching into her jacket’s inside pocket as he walked away. When she pulled the chess piece out, letting it lay in the palm of her hand, her tears had already ceased.  
   
She looked down the path that Miles had taken and she smiled. Then, she grinned.  
   
“He’s right,” she told the chess piece “It’s been up to me this whole time. It’s been my choice.”  
   
Ariadne stood. She laughed out loud and pulled her mobile from her pocket. Soon, she was pressing buttons and jogging away from the school, away from classrooms and grades, and away from normalcy.  
   
It had always been up to her.  
   
She finished dialing and broke out into a light sprint, already planning out how she would pack in her mind. Where she would buy her ticket; where she would catch a taxi to the airport. The phone rang and rang.  
   
It was possible the number didn’t even work anymore. It had been a number passed off to her moments before getting on a flight to LAX. It was assured that if she were followed after the job this would be the number she should call. She had never had a reason to call it.  
   
“ _Hello?”_  
   
Ariadne laughed “Arthur,” she breathed out “I made up my mind…I’m in.”


End file.
